2011-05-19: Living Upto Ones Namesake

Players:

Rashmi_icon.jpg Travis_icon.jpg

Summary: Rashmi and Travis learn that what is seen, cannot be unseen as they poke more into Franky's past.

Date: May 19, 2011

Log Title: Living Upton Ones Namesake

Rating: R


The Brayburn Textiles Industrial Complex


The Brayburn Textiles complex once again comes into view as the last rays of the setting sun return the area to the oppressive gloom that overtook the region before. From the looks of things your previous visit has gone unnoticed as the planks pried from the window of the office building are still laying on the ground and it looks as though the gate has remained close since the police tape is unbroken.

Travis adjusts his Barnes training uniform and shifts the back pack over his shoulder and looks over at Rashmi with a nervous grin. "Well, I guess we're back here. I'll be honest I'm not really sure I want to know what's going on here but I think it'll help us to help Franky." He says as he goes to enter the grounds the same way he came in the last time.

Having practiced the maneuver often in the intervening time, Rashmi's trip over the razor-wire fence isn't *quite* so shaky… but at this point it's really a matter of degree, her arc only slightly less unstable, her landing on two feet for a moment. Picking herself off the ground, she bruashes her skirts, frowning up at Travis. "…Well yeah, but now there's also *what the hell happened here,* y'know? No reports, no sign that there *is* an investigation… Someone covered it up, Travis… someone with pull in the police. … …And off the top of my head, the list for who *would* erase a major firefight, let alone could, is pretty short… And none of it's really comforting."

The open parking lot is empty as it was the last time. The buildings that remain to be searched are the smaller building on the western side of the lot, and the large main structure at it's far end. There is no light save what you've brought with you, the only sounds are those of crickets and other little critters of the night.

Travis nods to Rashmi. "I don't like any of this." He says taking a deep breath. He looks around as he approaches the main building and goes to one of the windows on the side to see if he can pry away the boards from there like he did the last building. "Well I'm being captain Obvious but I'm pretty sure this was the work of that anti-mutant group."

Rashmi glances around, watching for anyone who may be interested in their activities, as Travis attempts to pry off the boards. "Yeah… that's the Friends of Humanity. Y'know, all those jerks who like to hold anti-mutant protest rallies in Central Park? They're…. pretty scary, when they want to be. So… I 8guess* I can understand *why* there was a firefight here… sort of. And if Franky's involved, it *really* doesn't make me any more comfortable."

The boards come away with a little more effort than before. The opening is heralded by the smell of decay, mold, and a strong odor of burned electronics and diesel fuel. Without a light source the inside of the building is pitch black, revealing nothing that might be stored within.

Travis coughs a bit at the smell steps away. "It's smells really burnt in there." He says as he looks inside with the flash light to make sure it's safe to slip in. "I just want to gather what information we can and get out, I don't want to stay around here too long it gives me the chills."

"Smells like a lot of things," Rashmi mutters, pulling the collar of her shirt over her nose and turning her flashlight on. "…Yeah I don't blame you… C'mon. Sooner we get in, sooner we can get back out."

Entering the building the sheer size of the place becomes evident. The ceiling about thirty feet in the air giving the place a cavernous quality. It's clear no form of true industry has taken place here in some time. A foreman's office near the ceiling is unreachable as the stairway leading to it was destroyed, but with the flashlight's it's obvious the small room was riddled with gunfire. In the center of the room a large machine of suspect origin dominates the floor. Possibly a generator of some type as large cabled from the wrecked machine go down into the floor. It's obvious the building was intended to operate off the grid to avoid attention. A large freight evelvator that looks newer than the surrounding steel goes down but is unpowered. However an open doorway reveals stairs leading to the factory's basement.
There are no more bullet casings, somone has done a better job of policing thier brass in here. If there was any blood in this building the fire destroyed any evidence of it.

Travis walks around the inside of the building, doing a circle through and looking at all the equipment with his flashlight before heading to the stairs. "Wow..at least there are no more Friends of Humanity advertisements in here." He whispers with a bit of a nervous tone to his voice. "You think we should go downstairs it seems like that's the only option from this room here."

"…Yeah," Rashmi says after a moment's pause. "If we *really* need to get into that office… I can get us in. I *think.* Maybe. So, um, let's not test that unless we *really need* to, y'know?" Her beam plays over pieces of equipment, here and there, lingering on the cabling going down into the floor. But with nothing immediately recognizable with a big red neon sign flashing CLUE, it's clear her focus isn't completely on the things around them.

Travis walks over and takes Rashmi's hand. "Those stairs were destroyed so I don't know what they're going to be like going down. Let's just take them slow and hope that we don't end up going down the quick way." He walks over to the door and looks at the stairs closely with what light he has from his flash light as he starts to feel one step with his foot to make sure it's not going to break before heading down.

Rashmi squeezes Travis' hand, angling her light down the stairwell as Travis tests his weight, curious as to just how far down it travels… or as far as she can tell from their position. Her spheres fade into view, forming up into a pair of clusters that hover, inasmuch as they can, before the erstwhile investigators. "…Well if we *do* fall," she notes, hesitantly, "grab on. It's going to hurt like mad, but, better hurt than broken, right?"

The stairs are a bit rickety but hold as you descend into the basement. The basement level itself is divided up into a single hallway with doors on either side and a large door at the end. One room may at one time have been filled with machines of some kind but it's been stripped to the floor. Only discolorations on the blackened stone showing where the items sat before they were removed. The second room was some kind of records storage from the looks of it. Opened and emptied filing cabinets line the wall while a burned but empty desk sits in the middle of the room. From a void on the top perhaps a computer was taken from here. Piles of charred and waterlogged paper litter the floor. The last room has it's doors closed and will need to be checked seperately.

Travis walks into the second room and starts to look through the papers on the floor carefully, reading what he can without picking any of them up. "Do you think we should take these papers or leave them here. I don't want to remove any evidence but at the same time I'm worried that someone might come and clear this stuff out even more before we can do anything."

Rashmi sifts through one of the other piles, her spheres providing a hint of extra illumination beyond the spillover of the flashlights. Eyes that have had years of practice reading print, script, and the occasional illuminated manuscript for fun pick over the paper, searching for letters and words that could be strung together into pieces of coherent thought. "….Probably we should take at least some of it," she murmurs, most of her mind on her task, "that way we can look them over in better light. Besides… if anyone *was* going to come back, they'd probably have done it long before now… see also, the shell you picked up last time."

The papers on the surface are illegible. Having been at least partially burned before being doused in gallons of water, mildew and mold have set in making it impossible to pull any information from these pages without needing some extraordinary methods like a crime lab or similar resource. Rashmi's search however does unearth somthing. Underneath the masses of destroyed paper she finds a partially melted plastic folder. The paperwork within are in the same ruined state as the rest of the documents but she does uncover 4 photographs. Three males and one female, marked "Subject" with a letter 1 through 4 next to it. Wiping off the outside of the folder you can barely make out the label that reads "Project Patchwork"

"Oh my God," Rashmi whispers as the file is opened, gunk and detritus wiped off the front. "*Travis.* Look." Rising to her feet, she displays the folder. "There's pictures in here… here, look. Oh cripes, this is one of those super-people experiment things, isn't it?" Pieces start to fall into place, painting an extremely *chilling* picture. Followers of Humanity, a firefight, a cover-up… "…Travis… I think this is a lot bigger than we thought it was…"

Travis walks over to Rashmi and looks at the pictures and is quite for a bit, just nodding to her words. "I…I think so. Looks like the Friends of Humanity were doing something down here. Project Patchwork….I wonder if we can find out if any of these four are on any missing persons lists and if we can find it out. Maybe find out who they are." He says.

The room at the end of the hallway is all that remains. The doors need a little effort to force open but they give way to reveal a room larger than the others. Once again the room has been stripped to the floor but this time one thing was left behind. A large steel table probably weighing several hundred pounds, set on a single metal pole that seemed able to move the table up and down but any power to it was cut as evidence by the severed cables leading to it. There are what could only be wrist and ankle restraints on the tabletop but they seem to have been shattered, the way they are bent would indicate that whatever was on the table broke it's bonds and got up. The far wall the way the table is facing has an 8ft diameter hole it in though there's no evidence of an explosion. The other side of the hole seemed to be a large drainage pipe that an average sized person could walk through.

"Maybe," Rashmi says quietly, closing the folder and stuffing it into her bookbag. "Without names, it's going to be hard, though…" She falls silent, allowing Travis to do the work at forcing the final door open, and her breath catches at what's on the other side. "Oh, God," she whispers, one hand rising to clutch at her collar. "Travis… *Look.*"

Travis stops and looks at the table and shudders at what he sees. "It's like something out of a mad scientist movie." He says taking a few steps inside the room. "I really don't know if I want to know what they were doing here." He says as he shines the flashlight around the room. He shines the flashlight from the table to the hole in the wall and then back again. "Do you think whatever it was broke out of here?"

"Yeah," Rashmi says, looking at the circular voids on the floor, eyes welling up. "…Only I… think I know who it was that broke out… Travis. Look at that table… And the *hole.* You'd have to be *amazingly* strong to do damage like that. Like… Strong enough to carry a fridge like a sack of laundry."

"Franky." Travis whispers as he was thinking it but didn't really want to say it cause saying it makes it true. "Franky…Franky Stein…you don't think that name sake is just because of how he looks, do you?" Travis says as he takes a few steps forward and starts looking closely at the table. "Do you think we should tell him, I…I don't think it's the best idea."

"Travis I don't know *who* to tell," Rashmi whispers, hand finding Travis' and squeezing tightly. "…I don't even know if we can tell SHIELD… Because with everything else around here, there's still a big question we haven't found anything like an answer to. Travis… If Franky got out through the pipes, *who attacked from the outside?*"

"I don't know either, I really don't." Travis says. "Look how easily these restraints were ripped apart. Do you think they were trying to kill him and he escaped? And what would Franky and those four other people have to do with this." He thinks out loud as he finds the flashlight that he's holding being drawn to the steel table with a slight tug. "And this table…I think it's a magnet of some sort, look." He says putting the flashlight on it.

Rashmi's brow furrows, eyes darting to the circular spots on the floor again, then her face pales, eyes widening. Scrabbling in her bookbag, she pulls out the half-destroyed folder and flips it open. "Project… *Patchwork.* It…. I…. Travis. *Travis.* I…. I think whatever they did *worked.* And then…. well… *Franky.*"

"Wait you don't mean those people -are- Franky in a sense." Travis says as he looks around the room again. "So he really is Frankenstein. This is…horrible. Do you think whoever this was decided their project worked and changed, trying to kill him and all the evidence or do you think the Friends of Humanity were trying to stop them?"

Rashmi shakes her head. "No," she says, frowning at herself, "I… don't understand all of it. But… This was a place the FoH squatted in. That makes sense. It's abandoned, nobody cares, and they can come and go as they like and plot whatever mutant-hating plots they want. That's simple." As if to illustrate the path of her thoughts, one of her spheres floats up to revolve on her left side. "Then there's this. I *think* that whatever was going on in here was to build Franky. It worked, he woke up… and tore up the place trying to leave, because *every* newborn cries and hurts, and this one was super incredibly strong. *That* makes sense… really, really *horrible* sense." Another sphere takes up an orbit to her right. "Then there's the firefight… Someone twigged to what was going on here, assaulted the place, and it was explained away as a big fire, destroying or taking everything that could be evidence. Okay, *that* makes sense." And a third sphere floats over to orbit in front of her, each one rotating at a different speed and direction. "Travis… All these things happened here. What *doesn't* make sense is how they all fit."

"But who wanted…Rashmi." Travis says looking at her. "The other day you said the bullet casing looked familiar, like the ones at school. You don't think it was SHIELD that assaulted this place and tried to stop whatever the Friends of Humanity were doing and destroy Franky….and…what is Franky?" Travis says as he's quite confused himself. He starts to walk around the room looking at the floor, walls and ceiling, seeing if there's anything him or Rashmi missed.

"I think it might have been," Rashmi says quietly, reaching out to touch the twisted restraints, then skirting around to approach the gaping rent in the wall. "I can't say for sure… but… I don't think we should go up and ask. That's poking into classified business, and… well… that can't *ever* end well." Letting out a quiet breath, she runs a hand along the shattered masonry. "…I don't know *what* Franky is, Travis… I can't even begin to guess."

"Right now we keep this between us for now." Travis says. "I just don't know who we can trust to tell, I really don't. And in the meantime we make sure that Franky stays safe and has us as friends." He walks back over to Rashmi and shakes his head. "The place is pretty much clean. I just…this really doesn't sit well with me at all."

Rashmi nods once. "Yeah…." Turning, she draws in a breath through her nose. "…Yeah. Let's go, Travis… let's get cleaned up, and pay Franky a visit, okay?"

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